Monday, August 08, 2005

For illustrators, painters, animators and effects artists -- and anyone who has an interest in these artistic endeavors -- there is a new tablet PC-based animation and storyboarding system available that is tantalizingly mobile and cool. San Antonio, Texas based Bauhaus Software just announced their Mirage Nomad offering, which is optimized to run on the Motion Computing LE1600 Tablet PC. The tablet weighs about three pounds, is driven by a low-voltage Pentium M processor, offers WiFi connectivity and comes with 1GB of upgradeable RAM and a pressure-sensitive digitized pen input device.

The end-product combines real-time paint, animation and special effects functionalities at a suggested MSRP of $2,995 USD. As liberating as all this sounds, I can only hope that future versions of the Mirage can learn to bounce -- and to find their way home when accidently left behind at Starbucks....